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Red lines converse and run after each other. Between the strings of the armchairs, the texture of the velvets, the inside of the little table. The designated space is tight and claustrophobic in the overcrowded rooms of the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, with its gloomy, overpowering furnishings, its clutter of times gone by – armour, shields, tapestries, vases, sideboards, wall paper, wardrobes, pens, bookcases, books and pictures – in the spoliation of the life once lived in that mausoleum of a place.
Then in the geometric patterns of the floor, in the dialogues between forms, colours and materials, in rooms piled high, your glance suddenly sees a void. An apparent void, ordered and geometric, a void closed on two sides, perhaps a different kind of solid. Hints of bygone domesticity remind you that the museum of today, inhabited only by relics, vistors and caretakers, was once a home. Thus precisely that work, which becomes intimate, strong, precise and radical in its spare and almost archetypcal form, marks the advent of a breath of fresh air, an unexpected life in that space.
It is a fine, rigorous brushstroke on the confines of the insidious veins in the floor, a new form that upsets the cold and fragile balance of the house, despite the hard masculine sentiment of the interiors. It is a new expression, something light and airy that catches the house off-guard, and from that moment on, nothing will ever be as it never has been.
Davide Pizzigoni (Milan, 1955) is a many-sided artist, painter, product and set designer and photographer. He boasts prestigious partnerships with important European institutions, such as the Zurich Opera House and the Vienna Staatsoper, as well as with leading brands in the world of fashion, publishing and design
He designs and builds sets for television programmes about the world of architecture and design. He has had personal exhibitions in Milan, Rome, New York, Tokyo and Osaka. Since 2008 he has been working on the subject of the “invisibile” people who work in museums, in at least three directions: I Guardiani dei musei [Museum Caretakers], Gli Uomini del XXI secolo [Men of the 21st Century], La forma del vuoto [The form of the void]
Standing desks have a long and illustrious history: polymath Leonardo da Vinci was rumoured to have used them in the 15th century, followed by the likes of Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf. Early proponents commissioned high desks directly from carpenters, or used the taller shelves of bookcases, until manually adjustable sit-stand desks were invented that used hand cranks, pins, screws, or gas cylinders that compress and expand. UniFor’s latest workstation, however, the Spring System designed by architect Antonio Citterio, uses springs to counteract the weight of the desk as it rises.
When Monk re-enters Molteni&C’s catalogue this year, it will mark 35 years since the chair was last in production. “Designed by Afra and Tobia Scarpa, ‘Monk’ is simple and solid,” reads the company’s 1990 catalogue, the simple serif font set off by a photograph of two Monk chairs, tipped back on their rear legs as if preparing to march forward. Today, as Monk prepares itself to step foot into the present, this description of “simple and solid” remains a strong summation of its virtues, but the chair's simplicity conceals the sophistication of the design approach that led to its initial creation back in 1973.
The catalogue for UniArm, the new monitor arm from UniFor, opens with a few pages of closeup photography of the arm’s sleek, hinged form, followed by a double-page spread filled with an X-ray image of the product.
